Making a GOOGOL:1 Reduction with Lego Gears

Building a long gear train using 186 Lego gears. Many different types of Lego gears are used. Enjoy!

Read more details of the Lego machine here:

This was inspired by Daniel de Bruin's "universe's biggest gear reduction":

The finished gear ratio:
10341796308487334800992832804222885104773611498499997696000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000:1
or 1.0342e100:1
or 1.034 GOOGOL:1

Rotation time for the last gear:
52433879932503535381614991275498187972589101825233846406570841889117043121149897330595482546 years
or 5.2434e91 years

Formula for the gear ratio:
24/8 * 40/8 * 40/8 * 40/8 * 60/1 * 12/1 * 168/1 * (140 / 8 + 1) * 141 * 20/12 * (40/8)^20 * 20/12 * (24/1)^20 * 56/16 * (36/1)^10 * (40/1)^18 * 15/9 * 56/1

List of gears used:
27x Gear 8 Tooth [3647]
1x Gear Expert Builder 9 Tooth [g9]
6x Gear 12 Tooth Bevel [6589]
2x Gear 12 Tooth Double Bevel [32270]
1x Gear Expert Builder 15 Tooth [g15]
1x Gear 16 Tooth [94925]
2x Gear 20 Tooth Bevel [32198]
23x Gear 24 Tooth [3648]
10x Gear 36 Tooth Double Bevel [32498]
49x Gear 40 Tooth [3649]
2x Turntable Large Type 2 [48452cx1]
1x Turntable Large Type 3 [18939 / 18938]
8x Gear Rack 11 x 11 Curved [24121]
1x Gear, Hailfire Droid Wheel [x784]
1x Gear Worm Screw, Short [27938]
51x Gear Worm Screw, Long [4716]

For those wondering, the visual effect I used in the end montage is called Find Edges, comes with Adobe Premiere 14.

Music (used with permission):
Alpha Centauri B by Anders Enger Jensen

[vitalik]

At this point he's just flexing with all those Lego gears he's got

[knifetoucher]

FUN FACT: If this machine was turned on at the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago, that lego angel still wouldn't even have turned 1% of 1 degree.

[SpecialEDy]

Today, we'll be restarting the rotation of the Earth's core with Legos

[Jesse_]

Fun Fact: if you had to replace just the first 24-tooth gear once every thousand years, you'd need a supply of gears that is ~6*10^24 times the *mass of the observable universe* to provide enough replacements for the final gear to turn once...

[vzvdm]

I need this to turn my shower handle just enough so It doesn’t burn or freeze me

[mysticmarbles]

This quickly went from “I see what you did there” to “what the hell is happening.”

[TrainTsarFun]

He’s got a watch with second hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand

[BBD]

This should be placed in a museum, put on a permanent power source, and left alone forever.

[coreybuchanan]

Just to think that those lego pieces at the end, while constantly moving, are decaying far faster than they are moving.

[FurryEskimo]

Gear 51 slips*
“This little maneuver’s gonna cost us 51 years.

[oskar]

Me after every new gear section: Ok, so now it's pretty slow right?
This guy: But wait, there is less

[andysim]

The torque on that last gear could lift a planet. Assuming you made the gears out of some exotic materials

[VodkaVodoka]

Feels like the Lego man sitting there is experiencing some mythological torture. He will be free after he has rotated once, and has to watch the quickly rotating gears in front of him while the ones behind him are barely moving at all.

[wobaguk]

"...and when the bird has worn away the diamond mountain, the first second of eternity will have passed. But the minifig will still not have bloody rotated once."

[Hubertverse]

This is amazing! I never thought that you could put legos together in a way that would create an existential crisis.

[buob]

The scale of this gear ratio is genuinely RIDICULOUS. There is no earthly, or even universe-based way to describe a number like that. If you could set this machine outside of reality, we could go through hundreds of big bangs, big crunches, and more big bangs, hundreds of universes down the line (quadrillions or quintillions of years, since one universe can only last a couple trillion maybe) and the minifigure will STILL not have moved, even by an atom.

[benlanglois]

"Give me a gearbox large enough and I shall spin the Earth" - Archimedes, probably

[SixArmedSweater]

He's got a clock with a minute hand, millenium hand, and an eon hand, and when they meet it's a happy land, powerful man, universe man

[TheCarPassionChannel]

That's incomprehensible in so many ways, literally the slack/lash in the system won't even be gone by the end of a human lifetime

[opus]

I love this as a visual way of demonstrating the complete absurdity of how big a googol really is. Fascinating!